Zafiil: A Little Context

At the time I finished Zafiil, there was no such thing as indie publishing, and wouldn’t be for at least a decade. My goal was to be a Published Author, though, so I embarked on the tradpub process: write short stories to get your name out, while hunting for an agent, who will hopefully shop you to publishers.

I quickly learned, however, that no agent or publisher wants a debut author’s 1000+ page novel, no matter how promising. With regret (and determination), I set Zafiil aside and wrote some shorter books to use as ‘hooks’ instead. (This is how I began my famous Book One Streak: writing the first book of a series, seeing if it took, setting it aside and trying Book One of a new series to see if that had better luck, etc. I only just finished finishing all the series I started in my quixotic quest for tradpublication!).

Sometime in the middle of all that, small presses became a Thing in the SF/F industry. They paid less but they made a name for themselves by having editors known for ‘taking risks that big presses couldn't.’ (Later we discovered a lot of them also took all the money along with the risks, vanishing or declaring bankruptcy, but we’re still at the beginning of the story here.) After some extremely frustrating near misses with big presses, I decided to try for one of these prestigious small presses… and Zafiil was actually accepted by one.

Cue me being over the moon.

The editor, however, said that I would either have to cut the manuscript substantially, or it would have to be published as two books and I wasn’t happy with either of those suggestions. When I said so, the editor said, “Well, send me something shorter, and if we establish you as a success, we can make this longer book happen more easily.”

So I did, and they accepted that book, and then gave me an egregious contract I refused to sign. I walked, and Zafiil and that second novel (The Worth of a Shell) went into the trunk. I never regretted it because I am a stubborn and prideful sort and I refused to work with people I felt were disrespecting me. Two-plus decades later, I still agree that the contract was egregious, the editor dismissive, and that it was a good idea for Younger Jaguar to walk. But that left Zafiil (and me) in limbo… until the ebook revolution hit, and I saw an opportunity to finally stop waiting like a princess in a tower, and rescue myself. But Zafiil was not my first indie book, because the prospect of hauling it out, editing it, and preparing it for publication was daunting. I wanted to try my luck with something a little smaller, and maybe related to short stories I’d successfully sold to magazines, which is how Shell came to be the first novel I published myself.

I never forgot Zafiil.

Yes, that sounds dramatic. In some other person, it would have been followed by something like ‘she was first in my heart, and I knew one day I would see her published!’ or something like that. But most of you know me pretty well (and those of you who don’t soon will), and what you’re probably thinking is ‘wait, Jaguar, you have the memory of an oversaturated paper sieve. Are you serious.’ And… you are correct. When I say I never forgot my first novel, it’s because vague memories of its storyline started informing the modern canon of the Peltedverse as I developed it. It belongs in the Peltedverse: it, in fact, throws characters into it willy-nilly that could not possibly have been born yet, and jumps around in time in a way only a poorly organized but passionate post-teenage jaguar could have thought reasonable. But I kept writing modern stories, and kept thinking that the events in Zafiil happened, and by now there are little references all over the modern canon. They’re little because there aren’t that many Faulfenzair characters, but the fact that the Faulfenza are there at all means that Zafiil happened. Because she’s the one who made first contact with the Alliance.

And I loved her, and I still love the Faulfenza, and it was always my intention to have them more involved in the Peltedverse, and for that reason I’ve written myself around to a point where they get to move farther into the spotlight. And to do that justice, I need to nail down their past, and their past was explicated in that first novel.

Do I need to say it no longer fits into the modern canon? I probably do, don’t I. Because ‘memory of a leaky paper sieve’ combined with ‘unorganized but passionate post-teenaged jaguar writing her first novel’, with a dash of ‘unexamined-for-decades draft’ leads inevitably to ‘sprawling noncanonical mess.’ While rereading the book a year ago, I concluded there are enormous swathes of the book that are fine, but all the modern day parts need an overhaul. It’s still the grand and sweeping epic I vaguely remember, and I still love it enough to want to see it resurrected, but it’s going to need more than three days to rise from this level of dead, and God’s intervention is definitely going to be required.

(I think I can make this joke because some very weird circumstances have led me to pick it up again, which I can only conclude are divine nudging: ‘now’s the time.’)

This book, then, belongs to the Peltedverse. It was originally structured in five parts (called Movements, because dancers): the present day, and then Zafiil’s distant past, as a child; the present day again, and then Zafiil’s nearer past, as a college-aged young adult; and then the present day again, until the end of the narrative. To edit it, I’ve shuffled the order, starting with the sections of her as a child and a young adult and working on it as a sequential flow, leading to the whole rewrites of the present day sections. After those rewrites, I’m going to go through the whole thing again and do a second pass on the thematic and worldbuilding elements, to make sure symbols and events refer back to one another properly.  (Yes, post-teen me actually wrote in symbols, and had a list of things like ‘these colors mean this’ so that you can actually go back and find scenes written with strong palettes because they were supposed to Mean Something.)

I’m going to do the serializing in that order: from most distant past, to most recent events, starting with the two (!) prologues, which are fortunately only a page long each, but actually do matter. If you are talking about worldshattering religious events, introductions to long-dead martyrs actually works as part of the narrative. This serialization will be of my first pass edits; I won't be doing that second pass until after I'm done rewriting, and part of the point of serializing it is to keep my headspace in a 'this is going to be a real thing, after decades in a trunk' place.

Even excising enormous chunks of the original draft I still expect this book to need publication in two volumes, to keep the paperbacks from falling apart if you open them too far (or destroying your wrists, if you attempt to hold them for long enough to read the story). And depending on how fast I finish the re-draft of the modern events, I might accelerate the serialization. For now, once a week seems reasonable, and you'll be able to choose to read it in single chapter chunks on Patreon, or follow the link to the google doc where you can chat with, and respond to, the other people reading it there.

My thoughts were to go with either Tuesday or Thursday—if you have an opinion, let me know! But I’ll be starting us off next week, either way! Faulfenza lovers, your day has arrived. It's time to look into the history and heart of a people. 💖